The Purty Dozen

Gerard Brennan over at CSNI gave us the first look at Stuart Neville’s cover for THE TWELVE this week (rather fetching artwork, right), and also Stuart’s depressing reasons for why the previously monikered THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST will be called THE TWELVE for it’s UK release. Buggery, scooped again. Oi, Neville – that’s you and me finito, squire.
  Anyhoo, the reason I bring up THE TWELVE is that John Connolly was among those great-n-good the Irish Times asked for their ‘Books of the Year’ selections for 2008, the full list of which was published yesterday. Quoth JC:

“Meanwhile, this was a good year for Irish crime fiction, with strong additions from Declan Hughes, Tana French, Paul Charles and Brian McGilloway, among others. I suspect, though, that one of the crime novels of the year in 2009 will be Stuart Neville’s stunning debut, THE TWELVE (Harvill Secker, £12.99), which is, I think, the best mystery to have emerged so far from the aftermath of the Troubles. I read it in a single sitting, and it marks a major step forward for the genre in this country.”

  So there you have it. Stuart Neville. THE TWELVE. Remember, folks, you heard it here second.

A TOWER Rose Up In Brooklyn

I first heard about TOWER at the Baltimore Bouchercon, when I met Reed Farrel Coleman (right) walking around wearing a ‘TOWER’ t-shirt. ‘What’s that?’ says I. ‘A collaboration with Ken Bruen,’ says he, ‘out next year with Busted Flush.’ ‘Christ on a motorised mangle,’ says I, ‘that’s genius.’
  Sir Kenneth of Bruen has been writing twisted noir pastiches with Jason Starr for a few years now, of course, over at Hard Case Crime, but TOWER sounds like a different prospect entirely. Quoth David Thompson at Busted Flush:

“Born into a rough Brooklyn neighbourhood, outsiders in their own families, Nick and Todd forge a lifelong bond that persists in the face of crushing loss, blood, and betrayal. Low-level wiseguys with little ambition and even less of a future, the friends become major players in the potential destruction of an international crime syndicate that stretches from the cargo area at Kennedy Airport to the streets of New York, Belfast, and Boston, to the alleyways of Mexican border towns. Their paths are littered with the bodies of undercover cops, snitches, lovers, and stone-cold killers.
  “In the tradition of THE LONG GOODBYE, MYSTIC RIVER, and THE DEPARTED, TOWER is a powerful meditation on friendship, fate, and fatality. A twice-told tale done in the unique format of parallel narratives that intersect at deadly crossroads, TOWER is like a beautifully crafted knife to the heart.
  “Imagine a Brooklyn rabbi / poet — Reed Farrel Coleman — collaborating with a mad Celt from the West of Ireland — Ken Bruen — to produce a novel unlike anything you’ve ever encountered. A ferocious blast of gut-wrenching passion that blends the fierce granite of Galway and the streetwise rap of Brooklyn. Fasten your seat belts, this is an experience that is as incendiary as it is heart-shriven.”

  Sold! TOWER is due next autumn. Stay tooned for further details …

This Month I Was Mostly Reading …

Ye olde reading time was at a premium this month, for a variety of reasons, but while the quantity was low, the quality was pretty good. I gave up on Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO after something like 120 pages, not because the preamble was so tortured, but because I didn’t believe in what appeared to be the two main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. It just didn’t make sense to me that a wealthy industrialist, who wanted his family’s history explored with discretion and could afford the finest private investigation talents available, would turn to a journalist who had been recently disgraced in a high-profile court case in which he was found to be guilty of a serious error of judgement. The Lisbeth character, meanwhile, came on like a goth Modesty Blaise who was simply too good to be true. It’s a pity, because the overwhelming verdict seems to be that TGWTGT is a modern classic, and Ali Karim reckons it’s sequel is even better. Maybe I’ll come back to it in a few years’ time and try again.
  For some reason I re-read Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL immediately afterwards, and I should point out here that WEBT is one of my blind spots – I must have read it about six times by now. I’m not a MacLean fan, though. I know I read more of his novels in my misspent youth, but none of them stand up the way WEBT does. If you haven’t read it, it’s set amid the Scottish islands and features Philip Calvert as a British Secret Service agent investigating piracy on the high seas, which makes it kind of topical. The ‘Philip’ is a nod to Marlowe, presumably, as the style is a Chandleresque take on the typical Bond story, albeit one grounded in the kind of self-deprecation where Calvert describes himself as a civil servant. Pithy, funny and pacy, it’s a darling read, and I’ve only semi-plagiarised the style with third-rate knock-offs twice to date.
  I went straight from that to MacLean’s THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, because I’m working on something right now that involves WWII shenanigans in the Greek islands. I made it as far as page 17 or thereabouts, which was when MacLean has one of his characters tell how an island in the Dodecanese was invaded by German forces, some of whom were parachuted in. As far as I could tell, the story is set midway through WWII, but to the best of my knowledge the German parachute regiment – the Fallschirmjager – was downgraded to infantry after the debacle that was the airborne invasion of Crete, in 1941, and never went a-parachuting again. I hope I didn’t put away the book on the basis of my getting the timing wrong, but that kind of detail should be important. I can only presume the Allied commandos succeeded in their mission, given that FORCE TEN FROM NAVARONE was a subsequent best-seller, but I’ve never seen the movie and I probably won’t be reading the book again.
  I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t read a lot of women writers. I don’t think it’s a sexist thing, but more to do with the fact that men tend to write the kind of stories I’m interested in. Anyhoos, Mary Renault is one of the rare exceptions, and THE KING MUST DIE was the latest of her novels, most of which are set in classical Greece. It’s a fictionalised version of the Theseus myth, or the first half of it, covering the hero’s journey on the Greek mainland and his coming to recognition as the son and heir of the King of Athens, Aigeus, before he volunteers to be one of the victims sacrificed to the minotaur of King Minos and sails off to Crete to become a bull-dancer. Renault strips away the mythical elements, while remaining true to the quasi-spiritual aspects of the myth, and presents a fascinating tale of the clash of civilisations between the crude barbarians of the mainland Achaeans and the sophisticated culture of Minoa, which would eventually be undone by a combination of indolence, earthquake and ravening hordes from the north. Again, there’s a topical resonance, and Renault is a beautiful writer. Mind you, for a woman she tends to write quite a lot on the quintessentially male topics of war, conquest and glory – Alexander the Great was an obsession of hers – so maybe she’s not really an exception. I think she was a lesbian too, although I’m open to contradiction.
  Speaking of women with a male mind-set, I dipped into Alex Barclay’s latest, BLOOD RUNS COLD, and found myself fascinated by her creation Ren Bryce, a hard-drinking, no-bullshit FBI agent who seems to have more balls than most male characters. So I’ll be reading that next month. I’ll also be reading Donna Moore’s latest, on manuscript, because GO TO HELENA HANDBASKET was screamingly funny, and the first couple of chapters I dipped into there were just as hilarious. Staying with the manuscripts, I was sent an m/s of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, which is due out next year and already claiming all kinds of wondrous big-ups. The first chapter seems to bear them out, so that’s another cracker lined up for next month.
  Back to this month and another female writer, Deborah Lawrenson, whose THE ART OF FALLING was a terrific read. Set in the present day, but driven by a parallel narrative from WWII (Italy this time, rather than Greece), it’s the story of a woman on a quest to lay some ghosts to rest in order to gift herself the peace of mind she needs to be happy. Lawrenson published TAOF herself, before Random House picked it up and gave it the Big House treatment, and I enjoyed it every bit as much as SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, which employs a similarly dual narrative, this time steeped in the fictionalised life of a writer who bears a very strong resemblance to Lawrence Durrell, and which I’ve already recommended in these here pages.
  Finally, and for research purposes, I’m about to finish THE RASH ADVENTURER: A LIFE OF JOHN PENDLEBURY by Imogen Grundon, which features a foreword from Patrick Leigh Fermor. Pendlebury was a renowned archaeologist in the period between the wars, a specialist on Egyptian and Minoan culture. His life came to a premature end on Crete in 1941, when he was shot by German forces as a spy while working with the Cretan resistance while operating under the guise of the island’s ‘honorary consul’. His was a life lived to the full, and he seems to have been the classic kind of post-Edwardian renaissance man, and a superb writer in his own right who played a huge part in making the esoteric science of archaeology accessible to the masses. Grundon is also a beautiful writer, her own descriptive work no less evocative than the liberal sprinklings of excerpts taken from Pendlebury’s letters. All in all, it makes for stirring stuff.

Gone Fishin’

A couple of new offerings from the seemingly bottomless pool of Irish writers, folks. First up is Norn Iron’s resident evil genius Gerard Brennan (right), he of CSNI fame, with the opening to his novel PIRANHAS. To wit:

The streets of Beechmount stank of wet dog. The effect of drying rain in early summer. Light faded from the West Belfast housing area. Joe Philips yawned and slumped against the redbrick alley wall. Half past ten at night. He wanted to be in bed, cosy and watching a DVD until he drifted off to sleep. But he was the leader. The rest of the gang expected him to be there.
  At least it was holiday time. No school to mitch in the morning. He popped his head around the corner and glanced down the avenue.
  “I see one,” he said.
  They all looked up to him. Literally. In the last few weeks he’d taken what his ma called a growth spurt. He’d use his share of tonight’s money to buy longer trousers. Too much white sock showed between his Nike Air trainers and his Adidas tracksuit bottoms.
  “Anyone else about?” Wee Danny Gibson asked. He snubbed a half-smoked fag on the alley wall and tucked the butt behind his ear.
  “No, just the aul doll. Easy enough number.”
  Wee Danny nodded and the rest of the gang twitched, murmured and pulled hoods up over lowered baseball caps. Ten of them in all, not one above fourteen years old.
  “Right, let’s go,” Joe said.
  They spilled out of the alley and surrounded the blue-rinse bitch like a cursing tornado. She screamed, but they moved too fast for the curtain-twitchers to react. Broken nose bleeding, she dropped her handbag and tried to fend off kicks and punches. Wee Danny scooped it up and whistled. They split in ten different directions. The old granny shrieked at them. They were gone before any fucker so much as opened his door.

  Nice. For the rest, clickety-click on Allan Guthrie’s Noir Originals.
  Meanwhile, Peter Murphy’s JOHN THE REVELATOR will be published next February by Faber and Faber, with the book-trailer looking a lot like this. Roll it there, Collette …

“It’s Time To Put On Make-Up / It’s Time To Come Ye Back …”

If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. It’s been a tough week, folks, but the vid below fair cheered me up. Although Adrian McKinty may want to avert his eyes … The Big Question: Is ‘Danny Boy’ beyond parody?

Burke And McFetridge, Going Dutch

In case you missed the linky-poo on Monday, John McFetridge (right) is writing a meta-fiction-y short story in which he and I go on a crime spree during our pre-Bouchercon road-trip. To wit:

When I wrote my novel, EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE, I used Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, and I’m pretty sure that Declan Burke used them when he wrote his novel, THE BIG O, so it was natural when we teamed up to pull armed robberies on our way to Bouchercon in Baltimore, we’d use Elmore’s Ten Rules for Success and Happiness from his novel SWAG.
  In both cases we had to make minor changes to the rules. For one thing, grocery stores and bars never have much cash on hand anymore and one exclamation point for every hundred thousand words? Come on, these are crime novels, people getting robbed and beaten up yell ...

  It’s all true, by the way. Except for the bit where I call Elmore Leonard ‘Dutch’. For the rest, clickety-click here …

UPDATE: Now this is what I call the Big Time …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Tom Bale

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Anything by Graham Greene – BRIGHTON ROCK perhaps, as it’s set in my home town, but even the books he classed as “entertainments” are beautifully written. I am in awe of his talent and versatility.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jack Reacher. Tall, strong, fearless, morally certain and irresistible to women. It doesn’t get better than that.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
For the most part I think reading anything can be instructive, although I suppose Frederick Forsyth would fall into this category for me. The early books are very well-constructed thrillers, but his worldview doesn’t exactly coincide with mine, to put it mildly!

Most satisfying writing moment?
When Tif, my wonderful agent, rang me to say we’d had an offer from Preface. That was the moment when I realised I would be able to earn a living from writing. It was all the more gratifying because we were skint at the time, and because my editor, Rosie de Courcy, offered me the deal on the strength of my proposal for a very substantial rewrite. It was an incredible show of faith on her part.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I don’t feel I’ve read widely enough to comment fairly. I have Benjamin Black and Ken Bruen on my TBR pile, and after reading about Stuart Neville on your site I checked out the opening of THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST and thought it was excellent. And he’s not strictly a crime writer, but I think William Trevor is one of the finest writers alive.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Another question I have to dodge, I’m afraid! Often the books you most expect to translate to cinema prove to be a disappointment.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
It seems ungrateful even to contemplate the worst aspect of what’s always been my dream job, but I do miss the camaraderie of working amongst other people. Daytime TV is a poor substitute. The best part probably comes towards the end of the rewriting phase, when all the hard work is done and you’re just going over and over the manuscript, trimming it, making it tighter and better with each pass.

The pitch for your next book is …?
“DIE HARD on Sandbanks.” And as someone who’s always had trouble reducing my ideas to a snappy one-sentence pitch, I’m pleased that I’ve finally been able to do so with this book. The provisional title is TERROR’S REACH, about a criminal gang who take control of an exclusive island off the Sussex coast, intent on much more than just robbery.

Who are you reading right now?
Gregg Hurwitz, Adrian Magson, Brett Battles and I’m also re-reading John Sandford’s fabulous “Prey” series.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
That’s not a deity I could believe in. But I’d have to choose reading, as so much of the desire to write springs from the thrill of reading.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast, thrilling, satisfying – I hope. It’s for others to say whether I succeed.

Tom Bale’s SKIN AND BONES is published by Preface.

Stop The Press: Crime In ‘Doesn’t Always Pay’ Shocker!

News just in folks – your humble scribe (right) has just heard that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has declined to publish the sequel to THE BIG O, said sequel being the now rather ironically titled CRIME ALWAYS PAYS. Damn you, hubris! Details remain sketchy as to why, but it’s either (a) the new editor assigned to the book didn’t fancy it; (b) the global economic downturn is hurting in places I didn’t know I had places; or (c) said sequel is complete tosh. Or maybe it’s all three. As soon as I hear, you’ll be the first to know. Unless it’s (c), of course, in which case I’ll pretend it’s a combination of (a) and (b). Oh well, I guess it’s back to the turnip-thinning for yours truly. It’s been nice knowing you people, you’ve been a wunnerful audience …

UPDATE: Now this is what I call a cheer-me-up …

UPDATE 2: In comedy, it’s all about the timing …

Now Is The WINTERLAND Of Our Discontent

Don’t be fooled by his boyish good looks and cherubic charm – Alan Glynn (right) is something of a criminal mastermind. Yours truly was well impressed with his debut, THE DARK FIELDS, and there’s a rather impressive buzz building around his second, WINTERLAND, which is due early next year and appears to have nailed the second-rate circus that is contemporary Ireland. To wit:

“This is the colossus of Irish crime fiction – what MYSTIC RIVER did for Dennis Lehane, WINTERLAND should do for Alan Glynn. It is a noir masterpiece, the bar against which all future works will be judged … It’s as if Flann O’Brien wrote a mystery novel and laced it with speed, smarts and stupendous assurance.” – Ken Bruen

“Both a crime novel and a portrait of contemporary Ireland caught at a moment of profound change, WINTERLAND seems set to mark Alan Glynn as the first literary chronicler of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Timely, topical, and thrilling, this is Ireland as it truly is.” – John Connolly

“A thrilling novel of suspense from a new prose master.” – Adrian McKinty

“WINTERLAND is crime fiction of the highest order – smart, vivid, meticulously crafted, and highly entertaining. Alan Glynn has written a flat-out classic.” – Jason Starr

“WINTERLAND is a powerhouse of a novel whose pacy, character-driven narrative scrutinises Ireland’s underbelly, offering new meaning to the notion of corruption in high places. Glynn’s grasp of the big picture is as immaculate as his attention to detail. This is an exceptional and original crime novel, convincing at every level.” – Allan Guthrie

  Mmmm, nice. So what’s it all about then?

The worlds of business, politics and crime collide when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night – one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That’s the official version of events. But when a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions, this notion quickly unravels. Although she’s devastated, especially by the death of her older brother, Gina’s grief is tempered, and increasingly fuelled, by anger – because the more she’s told that it was all a coincidence, that gangland violence is commonplace, that people die on our roads every day of the week, the less she’s prepared to accept it. Alan Glynn is a Dublin-based writer whose first novel, THE DARK FIELDS, is soon to be filmed, starring Shia LaBeouf.

  All that, and depressingly zeitgeist-y too …

The Sunday Review

Being a cornucopia of reviews of Irish crime writing wot have popped into my inbox this week. To wit:

Andrew Nugent, SOUL MURDER (Monsters and Critics)

Alex Barclay, BLOOD RUNS COLD (The Guardian)

Siobhan Dowd, THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY (Semi-Colon Blog)

Cora Harrison, MICHAELMAS TRIBUTE (Monsters and Critics)

Tana French, The Likeness (Films and Books)

Ken Bruen / Jason Starr, THE MAX (Chicago Tribune)

Eoin Colfer, ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE TIME PARADOX (Evening Herald)

What Is This Thing We Call ‘Screwball Noir’?

Yep, it’s self-aggrandizing Saturday, this week courtesy of Lily Courthope over at Amazon.com. Lily, bless her, has taken umbrage at the Publishers Weekly review of our humble tome (right), and takes them to task thusly:

“Don’t you feel sorry for those PW reviewers?”: November 15, 2008

This is not the first time that I’ve marvelled at the staid, moribund quality of a PW review. I’m pretty sure that if an author isn’t named Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Faulkner, they just don’t get it.
  And that’s too bad because author Declan Burke has created a frantically paced comedy of errors that is a lot of fun to read. No, I won’t be writing a thesis any time soon about kidnapper Ray’s probable identity crisis, but when was the last time you read a line as funny as the one (right near the end of the book) in which he at last reveals his true identity? And that line is just the froth on this comic concoction.
  This book reminds me of some of my favourite movies: Libelled Lady, His Girl Friday, and of more recent origin, Snatch. Screwballs, every one of them. Some darker than others, some more romantic, but all of them with wild plot turns and breath-catching scenes that keep the viewer/reader fixed in place, waiting for the next laugh.
  If you’re looking for deep meaning and deathless prose, go check out the latest bestselling, yawn-worthy, overwrought work of ‘literature’ (or even another PW review); if you’re looking for a good time, call 1-800-THE BIG O.

  God bless you, Lily Courthope! So what is this thing we call ‘screwball noir’, people? Examples, please …

Your Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting ...

Herewith be an interview with Arlene Hunt (right; pic stolen from CSNI without so much as a by-your-leave) conducted by yours truly on the occasion of the publication of her latest tome, UNDERTOW. Now read on …

The crime novel is a fiction that is a truth for our times, and it’s certainly true that Arlene Hunt’s novels are nothing if not timely. Her last offering, MISSING PRESUMED DEAD, generated controversy for its subject matter when it appeared shortly after Maddy McCann went missing. That was a coincidence, of course, but it’s a poignant example of the symbiotic relationship between crime fiction and the world it describes.
  “I wrote of a child disappearing in 1980,” Arlene says, “and reappearing almost thirty years later – gun in hand. But because I used a toddler, and she happened to be female and blonde, some people automatically thought, ‘Oh, Maddy McCann’. In fact, I had written the first chapter – which dealt with a toddler disappearing on a beach – many months before that poor child ever visited Portugal. I think people like to look for controversy where none exists.”
  Her latest offering, UNDERTOW, published by Hachette Ireland, also digs into the seamy underbelly of modern Ireland.
  “The book opens with some low-lives smuggling vulnerable women into Ireland,” she says, “one of whom is coldly dispatched when she is deemed too sick to be of any use. We also meet Stacy, a heavily pregnant teenager who hires Sarah and John, my intrepid detectives, to find her boyfriend Orie, little realizing that he is connected with people-smuggling and has very good reasons to have dropped below the radar …”
  UNDERTOW is the fourth novel to feature ‘QuicK Investigations’, a Dublin-based private investigation bureau run by Sarah Kenny and John Quigley, a pleasingly normal pair of detectives who bicker, fall out and flirt – even if all the flirting comes from John’s side. I’m showing my age, but the first thing that springs to mind is the old Bruce Willis / Cybill Shepherd TV show, Moonlighting …
  “You’re not the only one!” Arlene laughs. “It’s not intentional, I promise. I think with John being something of a charming smart-arse and Sarah his relative straight-man, it’s unavoidable that people draw comparisons. Plus, there is the unmistakable whiff of attraction in the air. John has more hair than David (Bruce Willis) though. And Sarah would never wear shoulder pads.”
  Born in Wicklow, and currently living in Dublin, Arlene is nonetheless far more influenced by American writers than their Irish or even European counterparts.
  “I’m an American crime junkie and have been for years and years. Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, Denis Lehane, James Ellroy and my personal favourite, Joseph Wambaugh, are just some of the gentlemen I like to spend an afternoon with. Wambaugh writes the sort of book that stays with you for a long time after. THE GLITTER DOME and THE CHOIRBOYS moved me to tears and yet also had me howling with laughter.”
  So why is it that Irish crime writers tend to look to the States for inspiration?
  “Perhaps because they ‘do’ crime so well, and we can really relate to the great characters they somehow manage to create. I think we ‘get’ American drama better than we get other countries. Some of my earliest memories are watching The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O and Kojak with my foster-mother, Kitty. We couldn’t wait for Hill Street Blues to start every week. ‘Book ‘em Danno!’ ‘Who loves ya baby?’ ‘Let’s be careful out there’ … we just never tired of it. These days The Wire and The Shield have tickled my fancy tremendously. I adore Vic Mackey, even though he’s as crooked as a country mile. He is such a terrific character, crooked yet loyal, fierce, soft, vicious, hard, tormented and conflicted.”
  Arlene Hunt is something of a contradiction herself. Young, attractive and impeccably dressed, you’d probably peg her for a chick-lit scribe rather than a ‘crime junkie’ if she told you she’s a writer. So how come she’s poking around in the gory entrails of Irish crime and violence?
  “Ha, I’m blushing now … I’m not really sure what to say about that! I don’t know, people can be anything on the surface, be it attractive, sunny and charming or gruff and shy, but it makes little or no difference to the internal rumblings of that person. It’s funny, but I can be quite cheerfully plotting a murder scene while doing the most mundane things, like shopping in Superquinn, trimming the dog’s wretched nails or when I’m out running. Actually, I think of murder a lot when I run. So if you see me pootling along somewhere with serene smile in place, I’m probably mentally hacking someone to little pieces or super-gluing a character’s nostrils closed ...”
  In American crime writing, the setting of a particular city is very important to the story. How big a ‘character’ is Dublin in Arlene Hunt’s novels?
  “A pretty big one. Dublin is my home. It’s where I’m at my most comfortable, so it was important for John and Sarah – especially for Sarah – to be city-dwellers too. I grew up in Wicklow, I lived in Spain, but Dublin is where I feel happiest. It adopted me as easily as I allowed myself to be adopted. I was born in Clontarf, where Sarah lives for much of the books, and my husband and I frequent Wexford Street a lot where ‘QuicK Investigations’ keep their office. I like that my real and fictional worlds conflate and criss-cross.”
  Finally, there’s a lot of sexual tension between Sarah and John. Will they or won’t they?
  “Hah, you’ll have to wait and see …!”

Arlene Hunt’s UNDERTOW is published by Hachette Ireland.

All For One And One For The Road. Hic.

The good news, for me at least, is that I’m back writing after a new baby-inspired hiatus. The bad news is that something’s gotta give, time-wise.
  Loath as I am to add another blog to your daily load, methinks it’s coming time to separate the wheat from chaff at Crime Always Pays. As all three regular readers will know, CAP is but one weapon in Declan Burke’s arsenal as he bids for world domination, or a half-decent income from writing fiction, whichever comes first – the coverage CAP affords to other Irish crime writers is, of course, a fig leaf to disguise his contemptible ambition.
  Anyhoos, the plan is to set up another blog, this one dedicated to Irish crime writing of all hues (working title: Crime Writing Ireland), much in the way CAP already is, albeit devoid of the shameless plugs for THE BIG O in particular and Declan Burke in general. The format will be pretty much the same, with daily updates and whatnot, although I’m hoping that most of the material will be, y’know, actually useful. And there’ll probably be a bit less smartarsery, which I intend to save for Crime Always Pays.
  The big issue from my point of view, you won’t be surprised to learn, is that a new blog would create something of a strain on an already overloaded schedule, which is why the whole point of the proposed blog is to open it out to other writers. I’m perfectly happy to do the job of editor and keep the thing rolling along on a daily basis, but in terms of generating material, I’d be looking to other writers / bloggers / reviewers / readers to contribute. In other words, if we can get 10 or 12 contributors pitching up a post once per fortnight, or thereabouts, we should be okay. And the more the merrier.
  If you’re interested in taking part and creating a kind of community forum jobbie for Irish crime writing that benefits everyone, leave a comment or drop me a line. Oh, and I’m well into the idea of inclusivity – you need to be Irish about as much as I’m a writer, which is to say, not really. If enough people are interested, then we’ll take it forward from there, hopefully kicking off early in the New Year. All messages of support and advice are welcome. You know where to find me, people …

You Can’t Spell ‘Killarney’ Without ‘Kill’

You live a little, you learn a lot. Not only has it belatedly come to our attention here at CAP Towers (yep, all the elves finally straggled back from their summer sojourn to Santa Ponsa) that Atlantic Books are issuing a ‘Classic Crime’ series, and that said series includes Dickens’ BLEAK HOUSE, but they’ve also tossed us something of a curveball in Gerald Griffins’ THE COLLEGIANS, which is – apparently – a classic Irish crime fiction title, first published in 1829. Who knew? Apart from the folks at Atlantic, obviously. Quoth The Bookseller:

The series will begin on 1st November with a four-strong launch comprising Gerald Griffin’s thriller THE COLLEGIANS, Sapper’s detective novel BULLDOG DRUMMOND, RAFFLES by E W Hornung, and Charles Dickens’ BLEAK HOUSE, which Atlantic describes as “the first detective novel”.
  Thereafter, the publisher will launch a book every month—including titles by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sheridan Le Fanu and G K Chesterton—until at least the end of 2009.

Nice. Meanwhile, here’s the blurb elves on THE COLLEGIANS:

This romantic melodrama set in rural Killarney in the early 19th century was based on a real case of 1829. Its impressive Irish locations, thrilling characters, complex plot involving love, rivalry, secrecy, betrayal, and impressive denouement made it into one of the most successful thrillers of its day. Recently home from college, young Hardess Cregan rescues poor but striking Eily O’Connor and her father from an unruly mob in the street, with the help of his hunchback foster-brother and sidekick, Danny Mann. Although he is courting his wealthy cousin, Anne Chute, he is smitten by Eily’s beauty. And to complicate matters further, his friend and fellow collegian, Kyrle, is also in love with Anne - and vying hard with him for her attentions. He secretly marries Eily, but her unsophisticated ways soon begin to anger him. And - arrogant and full of roguish self-confidence - when his mother starts to push him into the very advantageous marriage with Anne, he starts to reconsider his choices ... Married to one, engaged to another: can Hardess extricate himself from this impasse? It seems he’s trapped - until Danny suggests that perhaps if Eily were to ‘disappear’, his problems would be solved ...

  You just don’t get many hunchback foster-brother sidekicks to the pound these days, do you?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Alex Barclay

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Jim Thompson’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Ooh … Jeeves. Bertie Wooster is priceless.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
No guilt for me … whatever I read, I love, so I’d never feel guilty about doing something I love.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When everything comes together. Because I don’t write chronologically, I have files of separate scenes waiting to be arranged. When I can put them together in way that surprises me and it works out well, it feels great.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Any of Declan Hughes’.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any of Declan Hughes’.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Solitude / solitude.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s Colorado, it’s below-zero, an FBI Agent hunts the killer of a colleague and starts to unravel her colleague’s life … and her own.

Who are you reading right now?
David Sedaris – WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. It’s an addiction. And I couldn’t do rehab. Too much sharing, too many group hugs.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fuelled by coffee.

Alex Barclay’s BLOOD RUNS COLD is published by HarperCollins.

The Devil Wears Prada. And A Red Dress, Apparently.

I mentioned a couple of days back that Niamh O’Connor has a new non-fiction tome out about Sharon Collins, aka ‘Lyin’ Eyes’, and now arrives news of Abigail Rieley’s take on the same story, THE DEVIL IN A RED DRESS, courtesy of Maverick House. Quoth the blurb elves:

Ireland has been gripped by the story of a housewife from County Clare who, when her millionaire partner refused to marry her, googled a hitman and arranged to have him killed. Over the course of almost two months, the story of Lyingeyes and Hire_hitman unfolded in a flurry of emails. The website, hitmanforhire.net might have looked amateurish and carried a disclaimer but it attracted serious interest. One person who was interested was Sharon Collins, the ‘devil in the red dress’. Desperate to get her hands on a share of her partner’s fortune, she took drastic action. She turned to Google to solve her problem. A Mexican marriage certificate was obtained but wasn’t enough. On 8 August 2006, she contacted hitmanforhire.net and started to arrange the hit. This is one of the most bizarre stories to ever appear before an Irish court. Filled with intrigue, betrayal, sex, money and would-be murder, it has all the ingredients for a best-selling thriller. This book will prove to its readers that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

  Or that the truth is, indeed, at least as interesting as a good Patricia Highsmith novel, whichever is more likely to tickle your fancy ...

Laugh? We Nearly Emigrated. Again.

Irish producer Adrian Devane has re-launched a nationwide search for new Irish comedy scripts to produce through his Ardmore Studios based production company 2000AD Productions.
  “What we are looking for are commercial, funny, character driven scripts,” says Devane. “We have been approached by a well known studio in Los Angeles to find and co-produce a great comedy script by an Irish based writer. I have read over sixty scripts in the last four years from Irish-based writers; three were good, and none of them are writing good comedy.”
  The new comedy scripts should be copyright protected by the writer, written in the proper script format and be between 90 and 100 pages. The films should be funny, commercial and aimed towards a production budget between $6-8million. Devane suggests titles like ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan’, ‘Napoleon Dynamite’, ‘Juno’, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, ‘The Wedding Crashers’, ‘American Pie’ and ‘The Wedding Singer’ as a guide to the type of films he is looking to produce.
  “If anyone feels that they can’t write a script but have a good idea then put a synopsis or treatment together and send that in but we are more looking for scripts that are fairly close to shooting,” states Devane. “The best advice I can give is to ask yourself three questions; ‘Will your script or idea make money to cover the cost of its production? Would you go and see it? Does it make you laugh when you read it? If you are unsure of any of those three answers then forget it, you are in the wrong business.”
  Adrian Devane has produced features films, documentaries, short films, commercials, music videos and TV since 1998.
  After two years of film courses at the Galway Film Centre, Adrian worked went on to work with Edwina Forkin at Zanzibar Films, Paul Holmes at Red Rage Films, Brian Willis at Igloo Films and Ned Dowd, a veteran of film making at Ardmore Studios. A graduate of the TV Business School run by the MEDIA programme Adrian has attended many film courses for producers in Ireland and abroad. ‘Veronica Guerin’, ‘Reign of Fire’, ‘Short Order’, ‘King Arthur’, ‘Apocalypto’, ‘32A’ and ‘Speed Dating’ are just a few films that Adrian has been involved in.
  To submit a synopsis go to 2000 AD submissions.

Argue & Phibbs, At Law

The Writer's Curse: if you made this up, no one would ever believe you …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jeremy Duns

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
ENDLESS NIGHT by Agatha Christie. It’s a late novel of hers, and oddly reminiscent of the Angry Young Men novels. It’s beautifully crafted, haunting, with a killer ending.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond - he lives well, saves the world, and survives.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust spy thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Coming up with the title for my first novel: FREE AGENT. I wanted something that was very simple, in the vein of Geoffrey Household’s ROGUE MALE, but that would also reveal another layer once you’d finished the book. I just felt a great burden had been lifted and it acted as a kind of mini-tone poem guiding the rest of the book.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Not exactly a crime novel, although it features plenty of crimes, Joseph Hone’s THE SIXTH DIRECTORATE, part of the superb Peter Marlow spy series, sadly long out of print. Gripping plot, beautiful prose.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE BIG O, of course!

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the mental strain of putting it all together. The best thing is being paid to do what you love.

The pitch for your next book is …?
1969: a British spy on the run in Biafra has to confront his past.

Who are you reading right now?
George Blake’s memoirs, NO OTHER CHOICE.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Spare, gripping, sweat-inducing.

Jeremy Duns’s FREE AGENT will be published in May 2009 by Simon & Schuster.

The Embiggened O # 4,209: Putting The ‘Fun’ Into ‘Funky’

Yep, it’s self-aggrandizing Saturday at Crime Always Pays, and Corey Wilde over at The Drowning Machine has been kind enough to review our humble offering, with the gist running thusly:

“Can you say funky? Can you say funky and Irish in the same sentence, is that legal? Is it possible? … THE BIG O is a fine, fun and altogether funky read. Take one part Ruthless People, add one part Fargo, mix with three parts black Irish humour, and you’ll still need author Declan Burke's storytelling skills to get it all properly shook up.”

  Thanking you kindly, Corey, you’ve been a wonderful audience. Meanwhile, Thursday night’s PEN gig was terrific fun. I met up with the luscious Alex Barclay beforehand for a bite to eat, and we had a very serious conversation about art, the craft of writing, and crime fiction’s place in the pantheon of literature. Koff. Anyhoos, the convivial atmosphere was rudely punctured by yours truly asking, “So listen, you know where the PEN gig is happening, right?”
  Erm, wrong. But we’ll draw a discreet veil over the sight of two authors who write about detectives and investigators and whatnot running up and down the length of Fitzwilliam Street in search of the United Arts club, and particularly the bit where a taxi-driver was asked for directions outside said club, this about twenty minutes before we actually found the place.
  Happily, the PEN folk were kindness personified, and the third member of the panel, Niamh O’Connor (right) had the good grace not to mention our tardiness. There was a terrific turn-out, and the event – once the malfunctioning microphones were dispensed with – was great fun. Not that I had a lot to do with it, naturally. Most of the Q&A queries were directed towards Alex and Niamh, and especially Niamh.
  An unfeasibly glamorous crime reporter with the Sunday World, Niamh also writes crime non-fiction, her most recent outing the tale of Sharon Collins, aka ‘Lyin’ Eyes’, the woman who contacted a hitman-for-hire website in a bid to have her lover and his two sons murdered so that she could scoop his €60 million fortune. Actually, the story sounds like a lurid novel – said lover has done his best to have Collins’s name cleared, despite the overwhelming evidence. Clickety-click here for a TV3 interview in which Niamh chats about the case and her book. It’s a fascinating tale, so much so that, if she’d written it as fiction, it’d have been laughed out of town …

Yea, Verily, Herewith Be The Vibe-Ups

Today seems as good a day as any to quote from the Bible, particularly when I’m hearing good news about a couple of my favourite writers, to wit: “As the vibe-ups descendeth upon the brows of my brothers, so too am I vibed up, verily.” First out of the traps is John ‘transcending the Johnre’ McFetridge, who got the hup-ya from Quill and Quire. Quoth Johnre:

Quill and Quire, “Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews,” picked 15 books from 2008 “to remember,” and EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE is one of them. The article says, “Some are critical favourites, some are bookstore blockbusters. Some dive into difficult subjects, some are about pure pleasure.” About EVERYBODY KNOWS they say it’s, “a sprawling portrait of a city that’s rare for any novel, genre or literary.”

  Hmmmm, nice. Meanwhile, a little birdie with a dulcet Norn Iron lilt tells us that Brian McGilloway’s Inspector Devlin series – currently BORDERLANDS and GALLOWS LANE, with BLEED A RIVER DEEP to follow in spring – has been optioned as a TV serial. Which is very nice indeed. What are the odds that Jimmy Nesbitt will play Devlin? Or, indeed, that Colin Bateman will take a hatchet to Brian McGilloway? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …
  Back down south, panting hotfoot, for the news that Colm Keegan’s play A NIGHT TIME CRACKLE will be one element of the latest Shoestring Collective jamboree. It all takes place on November 22nd, at the James Joyce Centre, 35 North Great George’s Street, Dublin 1, and I believe the poster pretty much tells its own tale. For more details, clickety-click here.
  Finally, and in keeping with our Biblical-ish tone – is it just me, or does this guy doth protest too much?

My Week At The Movies

You get to see a lot of rubbish when you review movies for a living, and while it’s nowhere as bad as thinning turnips or working on a building site, it’s incredibly frustrating to waste a couple of hours (plus the couple of hours it takes to get there and back) watching complete tosh when you could be doing something more useful, like staring at a blank screen and trying to remember how this whole writing lark goes again. Last week was a bad week, upon which we won’t dwell, but this week has been one of the better ones.
  I saw Waltz With Bashir (above, right) on Monday morning, an animated film dealing with the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the voluntary amnesia of some of the Israeli soldiers involved. Written and directed by Ari Folman, who served during the conflict, it’s a fairly straightforward narrative, in that it’s constructed from a series of interviews Ari conducts with former comrades in an attempt to fill in the missing gaps in his memory of that time. The animation is crude, a technique called ‘rotor-scoping’ that involves filming live and then painting over the resulting film; it’s deliberately crude, however, designed to place the kind of dream-like barrier between audience and action that the soldiers themselves seem to experience when they try to remember the details of the war. Naturally, it’s those details, as they emerge in a drip-feed manner, that prove harrowing. A brave and haunting film, Waltz With Bashir is as compelling as its subject matter is repellent.
  I saw Choke on Tuesday morning, the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. I thought the novel overwrought and grating when I read it years ago, a story with all the idiosyncrasies of FIGHT CLUB but none of the substance. The movie isn’t much of an improvement; the main character, Victor, is an accumulation of quirks and oddities, and never really convinces as a fully rounded person. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be a despicable human being, and that I’m not supposed to like him, but I’d have been equally happy to hate the sex addict-cum-scam artist. I just didn’t care enough either way, although Angelica Huston’s performance, as Victor’s dying mother, is a strong one.
  Tuesday afternoon brought the Irish movie Kisses. To wit:

Two kids, Dylan (Shane Curry) and Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) run away from home to escape Dylan’s abusive father and Kylie’s creepy uncle, and spend the night wandering the streets of Dublin. That’s the very simple set-up to Kisses, which was written and directed by Lance Daly, and the movie is as beautiful as it is simple. That’s not to say it’s a picture-postcard depiction of Dublin, or of its central characters. Dylan and Kylie are expertly drawn pre-teens from one of Dublin’s less salubrious suburban estates, with all the angst, conflict and hormonally-charged naïvety that that suggests, and both have the vocabulary of a fishwife. Most of the situations the pair find themselves in are not ones that will have Bord Failte rushing to promote this movie – Kylie and Dylan, searching for Dylan’s homeless brother, find themselves dealing with a variety of winos, perverts and security guards keen to make a name for themselves. But it’s the chemistry and relationship between the leading pair that make this work, as well as a script that showcases a very sharp ear for Dublin slang, and despite their sordid environment, this is an uplifting tale that’s similar in tone and intent with the last great Irish movie, Adam and Paul.

  Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
  Tuesday night found me in the Abbey Theatre for The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Berthold Brecht’s tale of the rise of an Italian-American gangster in 1930’s Chicago and the parallels between his coming to power and that of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Jimmy Fay, who has been turning out some terrific productions in the last couple of years, directs, and it’s a long but always compelling tale. Central to its success is the performance of Tom Vaughn Lawlor as Ui, a stunning piece of work in which Lawlor somehow manages to channel Hitler, Al Capone, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin and Richard III. It’s as fine a performance as I’ve seen on a Dublin stage in 10 years of reviewing theatre; if you’re in the vicinity of Dublin over the next few weeks, don’t miss it.
  Finally, the clip below is the trailer to Kisses. Roll it there, Collette …

O’Bloggers, Where Art Thou?

Took a quick shufty around ye olde bloggeosphere yesterday, and realised how many top-notch Irish blogs there are dealing with crime fiction. Tony Bailie (right) has a nice piece called ‘Thick as Thieves’ up on his interweb yokeybus, and I’m not saying that just because he name-checks yours truly. Okay, that’s a goodly part of the reason, but it’s still a pretty nifty piece nonetheless …
  Elsewhere, Neville Thompson has kicked off a recession-busting innovation. Quoth Nev: “In order to help with the current credit crunch, I have decided to write my latest novel as a blog novel, a chapter every Thursday.” Which is nice of him. Why not toddle along and leave him a comment?
  As always, Gerard Brennan over at CSNI leaves us all choking in his fragrant dust – this week alone he has posts on Ian Sansom, Sam Millar, John McFetridge and Brian McGilloway. All this when he’s supposed to be scribbling away on his own opus. Actually, it feels rather strange to try to remember a time when the world didn’t have CSNI … It’s a bit like mince pies, really. We could probably do without them, but wouldn’t you hate to have to try?
  Mmmmm, mince pies.
  Uber-babe and crime scribe Arlene Hunt has started blogging more often recently, very probably because she’s just released her latest novel, UNDERTOW, but she still doesn’t blog as often as she should, because she’s very funny when she does. Golly-gosh, isn’t it a terrible pity that she doesn’t know someone who could, y’know, help her out with that whole blogging malarkey?
  Finally, there’s always John Connolly’s blog. As he says in the intro to his latest piece, he’s been blogging less frequently too, mainly because he doesn’t want to repeat himself and waste our time. Bless. Anyhoo, there’s some smashing stuff in there this outing, in which John beards the literary types in their Canadian den. My theory on literary snobbery is, given that literary novels don’t really sell, the snobbery is all they’ve got. Literary writers are like the guys ‘n’ gals still living in two rooms of a crumbling old 40-room pile in the Home Counties, clinging on to that vestige of aristocracy in the hope that that will convince people they still matter. Quoth JC:

“A fellow Irish author enquires how I go about constructing a mystery narrative, given that it requires the farming out of information at certain intervals. I reply that I don’t plan it at all, and instead the revelations in question occur in part both naturally in the course of the initial draft and are also subject to revision during the process of rewriting as the heart of the narrative gradually reveals itself. I make the point that it is no different from the way in which a literary author approaches a book, and note the fact that his own most recent novel depends upon a series of revelations about an act of startling violence that has occurred many years in the past, so the difference between our texts is hardly as significant as he might believe. He doesn’t even answer, but simply turns around and walks away, as if appalled that I might suggest any degree of commonality between us.”

  An unnamed ‘fellow Irish author’, eh? My money’s on Michael Collins.

  UPDATE: Hurrah, a little birdie tells me it wasn’t Michael Collins! That’s a relief.

Blood Runs Hot

I’m pretty sure it was Declan Hughes they actually wanted, and someone got their wires crossed along the way, but it seems I’ve been pencilled in for a nice gig next Thursday, November 13, talking crime fiction in some rather glamorous company. To wit:

Crime Always Pays: Join Three Crime Writers for a Criminal Conversation

Who: Declan Burke, author of THE BIG O; Alex Barclay (right), who signed a high six-figure sum with Harper Collins for DARKHOUSE; journalist Niamh O’Connor, author of THE BLACK WIDOW.
What: Learn about crime fiction and true crime writing.
Where: United Arts Club, 3 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2.
When: 8 p.m. Thursday 13 November.
Cost: €3 members & €5 non-members.
Places limited. Booking essential: email irishpen@ireland.com or phone 087 966 0770

  The ever-radiant Alex Barclay, incidentally, has her latest novel, BLOOD RUNS COLD, arriving on a bookshelf near you any day soon. Hmmm. BLOOD RUNS HOT might be a more appropriate title, but then I’m a sexist pig, so what do I know?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: John Knoerle

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
FAREWELL MY LOVELY by Raymond Chandler.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Phillip Marlowe.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Cookbooks, esp. lushly illustrated ones. They’re foodie porn.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Can’t single out one but it’s that moment when you complete a circle you didn’t realize you were making.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
My ignorance of Irish crime novels is encyclopaedic.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Writing a good novel is damn near impossible. Writing a great novel, well, I wouldn’t know. But I’m betting it’s difficult.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A behind German lines OSS agent is invited to Berlin to participate in a post-war ‘business venture.’ He thinks it smells fishy but goes anyway. He’s right.

Who are you reading right now?
FLASHMAN by George MacDonald Fraser.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. But then how do I edit?

The three best words to describe your own writing are ...
Bloody damn fantastic.

John Knoerle’s A PURE DOUBLE CROSS is published by Blue Steel Press.

And If You Tolerate This …

I’m in the process of writing a feature about Irish women crime writers, and one of the questions asks if any of the ladies have a theory as to why there’s been such an upsurge in Irish crime writing recently. One of them pointed me in the general direction of today’s front page headlines, to wit:

Long-running drugs feud claims another innocent victim

Shot dead because he looked like gang's real target

999 caller told the operator he strangled Dublin mum

Man due in court over Larne murder

Dublin dad is charged with making child porn

Three men jailed for failed Securicor cash van heist

Dissidents co-operating with each other more, says IMC

Charged: 3 on €675m drug boat

  It surprises people when I tell them that there’s roughly 50 Irish crime writers currently being published. Actually, the wonder is there isn’t more.
  Meanwhile, our thoughts go out to the families of Carmel Breen, Shane Geoghegan and Kenneth Nicholl. RIP.

Erm, Have We Had A ‘Dear Genre’ Post Yet This Week?

Kevin Power reviewed the latest Paul Howard novel, MR S AND THE SECRETS OF ANDORRA’S BOX, in the Irish Times yesterday, Paul Howard being the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a Falstaffian comic foil that has allowed Howard skewer the pretensions of Celtic Tiger Ireland over the course of nine novels. The gist of Power’s review runneth thusly:

Irish fiction hasn’t kept up with Irish reality. So we get “literary” novels about paedophile priests, novels about the Famine, novels in which farmers walk the fields - but who pops into Starbucks and orders a grande chai latte with soy? During the last decade few novelists have bothered to notice what modern Ireland is actually like. This is terrain that Paul Howard … has made his own, seeing - or, more accurately, hearing - what the Irish really are, in south Dublin anyway … You will search the pages of our more distinguished literary novelists in vain for this kind of thing. When was the last time you read a novelist whose ear for the way some Irish people speak was so acute that he was capable of writing a sentence like “Just going back to what you were saying there about the whole non-national thing”?

  About two weeks ago, actually, when I read Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK. Power’s novel deals with the same strata of Irish society as Howard’s, albeit in a more serious vein. While I believe that the culture both men target is so hollow as to defy satire – Howard’s novels are much closer in tone to farce – Power certainly recreated the mini-cosmos with a deft touch, in the process showcasing a sharp ear for dialogue.
  Having said that, you have to wonder why Power ignores novels other than “literary” ones when making his point about fiction not dealing with the ‘real Ireland’. There are many examples of women’s fiction, aka chick lit, nailing the zeitgeist, the best and most popular being Marian Keyes. And, naturally, there are any amount of crime fiction novels that do so too. In 2008 alone we’ve had Declan Hughes’s THE DYING BREED, Tana French’s THE LIKENESS, Brian McGilloway’s GALLOWS LANE, Andrew Nugent’s SOUL MURDER, and Ingrid Black’s CIRCLE OF THE DEAD.
  You can argue in your own time about the literary merits, or otherwise, of those novels, although I’d argue that when it comes to storytelling, language is a tool akin to the sculptor’s chisel or the filmmaker’s camera – in other words, it needs to be first and foremost functional before it can start claiming any other virtues. The point being, there are plenty of novels relevant to the ‘real Ireland’ – there are novels due from Gene Kerrigan, Christy Kenneally, Declan Hughes and Tana French next year – that are being written with an ear for who we are now and where we are going.
  This is not to damn “literary” novels for not engaging with modern Ireland; a little birdie, for example, tells me that Gerard Donovan, for one, is currently at work on ‘a novel of crimes’, while David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, published earlier this year, is a powerful work about the post-Troubles political landscape in Northern Ireland. But why is it that only “literary” novels are accorded sufficient weight and credibility when it comes to recording the authentic experience of what is ‘real’ about the way we live?

The Embiggened O # 3,208: In Which Shots Rang Out

It’s Saturday, so it must be the self-aggrandizing plug for yours truly. Tony Black is one of the busiest men in crime fiction, even when he’s not penning his own novels, so it was nice of him to take time out and Q&A your humble host for Shots magazine, an excerpt from which runneth thusly:

TB: “So far as I can tell, the early reviews for THE BIG O in the States have been very kind. Did you always expect the Americans to get you?”

DB: “The reviews have been terrific. I’m stunned, to be honest with you. Kirkus even gave me a star, and I haven’t had one of those since primary school … No, it’s great. And I didn’t ‘expect’ anything, that’s being straight. The way THE BIG O came about, being co-published and all, everything since has been a bonus, just enjoying the ride. So to get good reviews Stateside … I guess it does make sense in one way, because the influences on THE BIG O are all American. The models for the kind of story it is were Elmore Leonard and the movies of the Coen Brothers … that kind of off-beat comedy crime caper they do so brilliantly. So I suppose it’s hardly surprising that American readers might ‘get’ the story, or the way it’s presented. Mind you, I should probably say that the reviews, they’ve been very kind in that some of them have mentioned Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Carl Hiassen … but I think that that has more to do with how few reference points reviewers have in the context of comedy crime capers than the quality of the book.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Michael Dymmoch

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
MYSTIC RIVER. For some reason it’s still meandering through my head, though I read it years ago.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Odysseus. He was brave, cunning, practical, curious, and human.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Baroness Orczy , Alexandre Dumas, Zane Gray.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Someone I sent a piece to responded with, “Damn You!” It wasn’t what I was aiming for, but it obviously evoked a strong emotion.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I really loved John Connolly’s THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS although I’m not sure it qualifies as a ‘crime’ novel, and The Crying Game though it’s not a novel. I’m sorry to say I’m not really familiar with Irish fiction – I’m hopelessly behind on reading well-known American writers. BTW – Who do you suggest I read after you?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Guillermo del Toro could do a great job with THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: Sometimes the words won’t come, or when you have a deadline, you get dozens of ideas for other books, none for the book you’re working on. Best: Total strangers come up to you and rave about something you wrote, speaking as if the characters you invented were living beings. (It’s also nice to kill people off in your latest opus when they get on your nerves.)

The pitch for your next book is …?
In 1998, a young man is dragged to death in Boys Town. A victim of malignant homophobia or something else?

Who are you reading right now?
I’m working my way through the stack of books I brought home from Bouchercon, including Barry Eisler, Jason Goodwin, Lynda LaPlante, and Reed Farrel Coleman.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Neither. MY God would certainly know that you can’t write if you don’t read, and would never demand a such a choice. Maybe the devil...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
My own style.

Michael Dymmoch’s M.I.A. is published by St Martin’s Minotaur.